Google AI Overviews in France: The Measured Impact on Your Traffic

The StartingUp Summer continues. Taking stock of a year of innovation also means facing the uncomfortable numbers. After laying out the GEO framework, we put a number on what Google's AI Overviews do to site traffic, on the eve of their launch in France.

You may have already seen this block while traveling, or on a VPN: above Google's search results, a paragraph written by an AI answers the question directly, sources included. These are AI Overviews. They've existed elsewhere in the world for two years, and they're arriving in France as we write this. The question is no longer "will it happen?" but "what will it do to my traffic?". Good news: two years of hindsight elsewhere also means two years of data. This article puts it on the table.

When an AI Overview displays, the click-through rate of the top organic position drops between 34.5% and 58%, according to Ahrefs measurements. And Google has confirmed the launch of AI Overviews in France no later than September 23, 2026. Here, backed by data, is what that means for your site.

Launched in the United States in May 2024, AI Overviews expanded in waves: about a hundred countries by late 2024, then, on March 26, 2025, nine European countries including Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium and Switzerland. France, meanwhile, stayed on the sidelines: not for a technical or linguistic reason, but a legal one. The 2019 law on neighboring rights requires paying press publishers for the reuse of their content, and Google, already fined 250 million euros by the French competition authority in March 2024, chose to stall.

That grace period is ending. In late June 2026, Google confirmed to French press publishers the launch of AI Overviews and AI Mode (its conversational search tab powered by Gemini) before September 23, 2026, with three commitments: publisher control over their appearance in these features, transparency on impressions generated, and compensation under neighboring rights. Rollout will likely be gradual, depending on accounts, queries and devices. In other words: the French market is about to live through, with a two-year lag, what its neighbors have already gone through. That's a rare chance: knowing in advance what's coming.

Three serious studies, with different methodologies, converge on the essential point: when an AI Overview displays, clicks to sites drop sharply.

The Pew study adds a detail that carries weight: users end their session more often after a results page with an AI summary (26%) than without one (16%). The answer was enough for them. That's the famous zero-click: the search succeeds, but nobody visits anybody.

In fairness, not all the data points the same way. Semrush observes that, on identical queries tracked before and after an AI Overview appeared, the share of no-click searches slightly fell (from 33.8% to 31.5%). The exact size of the effect is therefore still debated, and depends heavily on what is measured and how. But Ahrefs' updated figures, which show an impact worsening over time (from 34.5% to 58% in ten months for the top position, and still a 19% drop at position ten), suggest users are growing used to trusting the summary. The underlying trend leaves little doubt.

Exposure depends almost entirely on the nature of your queries. At launch, AI Overviews triggered massively on informational intent: Ahrefs measured in 2025 that 99.2% of the keywords involved fell into that category. The first hit are therefore publishers of informational content: media outlets, advice blogs, how-to guides, definitions, tutorials. Everything that answers "how", "why", "what is".

Conversely, three query families hold up better:

• Transactional queries: buying, comparing prices, booking. The user has to land somewhere anyway to close the loop.
• Brand queries: whoever types your name wants your site, not a summary.
• Local queries: finding a tradesperson, a restaurant, an agency nearby is still largely served by classic results and local listings.

One caveat though: this boundary is moving. According to Semrush, the share of commercial and transactional queries among those triggering an AI Overview grew markedly over the course of 2025, with informational intent falling from 91% to 57% of the total. The spared zone is shrinking; it isn't disappearing, but building your peace of mind on it would be unwise.

If the summary captures attention, you might as well show up in it. AI Overviews cite their sources: in Pew's sample, 88% of summaries cited at least three. These links get few clicks, but they carry your name at the exact moment the answer is forming in the user's mind. And the content cited isn't always what ranks first organically: selection follows the logic of generative engines, the one we detailed in our guide to getting cited in LLM answers. The same levers apply here: clear, sourced claims rather than generalities, dated and quantified data, a clear structure (explicit headings, direct answers at the top of a section), clean structured data, and a site technically readable by Google's robots.

No recipe guarantees the citation, and be wary of anyone who promises otherwise. But the asymmetry deserves pointing out: not being cited in an AI Overview that displays on your queries means handing the floor to others on your own turf.

For a long time, there was no way to tell anything apart: impressions and clicks tied to AI Overviews were folded into the totals of the Search Console performance report. That fog is partly lifting: in early June 2026, Google launched a performance report dedicated to generative AI in Search Console, isolating impressions of your pages within AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover's generative features.

Its limits, as we write this, are real: impressions, but no clicks, no CTR, no queries. You know you're showing up, by page, by country and by device, without knowing on which questions or with what effect. The report's rollout is also gradual. Until something better exists, our recommendation comes down to three moves: set a baseline now for your organic traffic by page type (before AI Overviews arrive on the French market, it will be worth its weight in gold); watch the new report as soon as it appears in your Search Console; and manually test your strategic queries to see whether a summary displays, and who it cites.

An honest reading of these two years of data fits in three sentences. Yes, AI Overviews reduce clicks on the queries they cover, and the effect strengthens over time. No, they don't doom your visibility: they relocate it, from the list of links to the answer itself. And this shift won't happen in France "someday": it has a deadline, and it's imminent.

So we need to relearn how to count. One fewer session in your analytics tool is no longer necessarily a lost prospect: sometimes it's someone who read your name, your figure or your recommendation in the answer, and who will find you later through a brand search. Traffic remains a currency, but it's no longer the only one: presence in the answer becomes a second one, harder to count, just as real. The companies that will navigate the coming months best won't be the ones defending their sessions unchanged, but the ones who know where their visibility went, and go find it there.